


Galatea

by viyeolent (Doxophobia)



Series: Artificial Love [1]
Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Abuse, Age Difference, Alternate Universe - Syndicate, Anal Sex, Android Chanyeol, Baekhyun is a child, Blood and Torture, Everyone is at least a decade older than Baekhyun, Gun Kink, Gunplay, Human Trafficking, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Murder, Objectification, Pedophilia, Prostitute Baekhyun, Prostitution, Sex Androids, Suicidal Thoughts, Underage Sex, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-25
Updated: 2016-10-25
Packaged: 2018-08-24 15:08:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8376802
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Doxophobia/pseuds/viyeolent
Summary: Baekhyun is six: he watches daddy point a gun at himself. Baekhyun is ten: he is the bait for the women his family trafﬁcks. Baekhyun is sixteen: he has tasted more than a hundred men and is now the boss' favourite whore. Baekhyun is seventeen: he becomes a murderer, calls himself a monster, and is everything that Chanyeol's artiﬁcial eyes and mechanical hands will worship as god.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This _may_ or _may not_ the first part of a series of Artificial Love-inspired mafia/prostitute!AU fics. /shrugs
> 
> Anyway, read the tags **very** carefully. This fic isn't explicitly gory or sexual, but it still contains themes that some may find triggering such as rape and abuse. You have been warned.

* * *

 

 

 

>  "I couldn't find beauty in this world and yet, I found perfection in you."

 

**G A L A T E A**

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

Baekhyun is six when father makes red burst out of his own head.  
  
  
The heavy liquid is dark, thick, and it sticks to little Baekhyun's skin as he nudges what's left of daddy. He cries because of hunger and he cries even more when daddy—his home, his world, his _life_ —never answers. He doesn't know where home is anymore and he doesn't know how he'll ever go back.  
  
  
(There's nowhere, and nothing, to return to.)  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
**_Daddy's work is dangerous.  
  
  
Daddy can't do it anymore so his of_** ** _ﬁcemates are mad at him.  
  
  
Daddy is very sorry._**  
  
  
It is the ﬁrst time his daddy takes him to work.  
  
  
It makes him happy, not being left in the care of people he doesn't know and do not console him when he asks when mommy would come back home or why she left to begin with, so he smothers his snifﬂes and focuses on the tight line that daddy's lips make instead of the chipping of white paint against cracks of grey cement on the other side of the room. Daddy holds his small hand and leads him beyond the pile of old newspapers and towards the only thing to sit on. A bed frame, it's wiry and broken and dirtied by black, and it creaks in protest when he makes a chair out of it.  
  
  
Baekhyun watches obediently as daddy gives him a smile, which he readily returns despite the weird twisting his tummy makes and the glistening in daddy's eyes.  
  
  
**_Daddy knows where mommy is.  
  
  
Daddy can't bring you with him. Mommy will be very sad if daddy does.  
  
  
Daddy loves you. He loves you very, very much._**  
  
  
It is not even a moment after he opens his mouth to ask, "Why? Where is mommy?" that he hears the words _I'm sorry_ and watches daddy point the hard and heavy paint brush at himself, pressing the tip against his own chin with an unsteady hand. There is a _click_ , a tiny yet deﬁnite sound that is made so loud in the dead silence of a ﬁlthy and abandoned apartment complex, before his ears are ringing.  
  
  
There is a _bang_ , then a splatter.  
  
  
(Daddy has always been a brilliant painter, even though red is the only colour that he has ever seen daddy use.)  
  
  
Just like all the rest of the melancholic man's masterpieces right after they meet the other end of daddy's paintbrush, daddy, too, abruptly turns into an unfathomable heap of... _something_. All that is left, where daddy's head is supposed to be, is a huge, gurgling mess of damp bits and pieces, of bone and ﬂesh splattered on a sound-proofed wall, entirely draped in the richest of reds. The whimper from his lips cannot be stiﬂed after he reaches for daddy's hand and burns his hand for grasping ice. The voice that comes crawling out of his mouth is so small, so confused, that he doesn't believe it is his. It's not his.  
  
  
He can't hear anything else, though.  
  
  
(He only hears his world burn itself down.)  
  
  
It is the last time he calls a man his daddy because he is their son, but at the time, all he knows is the rumbling of his hungry stomach that is beginning to eat itself and the patient knocks that eventually come from the other side of the unhinged door.  
  
  
(Nothing is crueller than surviving that night.)  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Baekhyun is ten when he sees mommy.  
  
  
She ﬁnds him crying outside of a convenience store just a couple of hours before midnight. She's weary from overtime, but she still smiles and comforts him with a hug. He takes a good look at her after she has wiped his tearstained eyes.  
  
  
She holds his small hand while he leads her away from vigilant eyes and to where their new family awaits. She doesn't like his new big brothers and tells him to run, believing he could be saved, but letting them take her is why he's there. In exchange for her, he gets food, clothes, and a room away from ﬁlthy hands. After they sneak her into the van, she is never seen again; just like the woman before her; just like the women who will come after her.  
  
  
He pretends every woman is mommy up until the famiglia takes her away again.  
  
  
(Even if it's just pretend, he still doesn't get to say goodbye.)  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Baekhyun is ten when he ﬁnds himself still trying to make sense of the aftermath of having let those men inside the room.  
  
  
Four years ago, one of those men had snorted upon seeing daddy, who had taken a nap and simply never woke, no matter how long he waited. They had taken him away even though he insisted that daddy didn't want him to talk to strangers. He had waited for daddy to get up and tell the strangers not to touch him.  
  
  
Daddy never did, and he had been so, so confused when they brought him outside of the world he knew and into the world he should have never known. They pulled the shirt mommy gave him for his birthday over his shoulders and traced invisible shapes over his chest and its pink peaks. He told them to _stop;_ said the candy they shoved into his mouth _wasn't_ candy, that it was _bitter_ and _disgusting_ , and then he ran. He ran faster—until he lost his shoes and his feet wore red—but no matter where, they just found him again, and again, and _again_.  
  
  
(There's nowhere for a mouse to run in a tiger's cage.)  
  
  
He had yet to accept that daddy was gone, that no one was going to come for him; that he was now property, an object, a gloriﬁed hole in the wall for the mob that owned him just because daddy didn't want to make money with them anymore.  
  
  
Now, he makes kind women wipe away his fake tears so the men could snatch them off the dark streets and touch _them_ instead of him; so that men wouldn't ask him things he can't answer _No_ to or put things in his mouth anymore. For as long as he is a good boy to those grown-ups who like little boys like him, he will continue to receive food, shelter, and warmth—whether it were clothes or a body on top of his.  
  
  
Right and wrong fail to matter when he worries about being at the other end of father's paintbrush every day, even though it hurts; even though it never feels right; even though sometimes he thinks about being covered in red instead of a sticky off-white and how it is both terrifying and comforting to dream of taking a nap that will never end. It is always a comfort, no matter how small, to not be lucid during nightmares.  
  
  
Eventually, he accepts wrong for right, so hearing and seeing these women cry with real tears, and scream, and struggle until they become damaged goods confuses him, already having forgotten the things that daddy told him about right and wrong. All that matters, to him, right now, is that he cannot possibly let himself be found alone or be thought of as useless. He cannot be as pitiful as these broken women.  
  
  
At ten, Baekhyun learns that there are no such things as nightmares, only reality.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Baekhyun is sixteen when he proves to himself the worth of his face, the worth of his own body. Nobody is allowed to touch him now unless his price is paid.

 

He gets paid to squirm in bed; to be coy, to be subdued, to keep his mouth shut. He gets more if he has to scream; if he has to cry, to beg, to _bleed_. He is the famiglia's most prized whore now, and it is just right that hurting him comes with the greatest price.  
  
  
Severed limbs. A head. Possibilities of a future.  
  
  
Your wife. Your daughter. Whoever is left of your family to weep.  
  
  
All he has to do to relieve a headache is to point a ﬁnger at a man he dislikes. It's both pleasure and pain, to have this much power over a man's existence, because all there is to do for him is to warm his clients' eager cocks and they will be utterly willing to give him anything, _everything_. A bed transforms him into their god—made to be revered and worshipped by both hands and a mouth.  
  
  
And yet, Baekhyun feels himself to be both everything and nothing.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Baekhyun is sixteen when he lets a man's mouth latch on his neck and spreads his legs.  
  
  
He moans, hot and breathy and just the right nuance of desperate as he trades propriety for a whiff of a rich man's cologne and lets himself be bent on a dark mahogany desk. It's better than being fucked like a dog on the cold marble ﬂoor, although not that much. The man calls him a whore, in that husky baritone laced with so much disgust that it makes his blood rush and gut tighten, as if it were a word that hurts him instead of something that's just is.  
  
  
A whore. Baekhyun is a whore. Ha, if the men he has slept with think of it as an accomplishment, then why would _he_ think of it—being the _best_ and willing young fuck his customers will _ever_ have—as anything less?  
  
  
He laughs at the sad attempt of dirty talk and rolls his hips instead, taking both of their minds off the imaginary need to ﬁll the silence with anything other than his rehearsed sighs and the wet noise of another married, homophobic man's stiff cock inside of him. The man, whose eyes are red and crazed, doesn't like his laugh; doesn't want to hear him speak; doesn't like his voice, so he stops himself to avoid being damaged. It never pays to be a prostitute with a ruined face.  
  
  
He gets hurt anyway, and he is sent back to his owner at dawn—stripped of dignity, covered in reds and purples, and, perhaps, closer to death than he has ever been in a while.  
  
  
In the short moment after he wakes up, he almost tells the boss—the head of the famiglia, his owner—that the 'special favor' almost killed him; that the man he had been sent to relieve is a sheltered psychopath and deserved to be more than viliﬁed; deserved to be peeled of his own skin and thrown onto a ﬂoor full of salt and man-eating leeches. He catches himself before any of the words could slip out of his swollen lips, and it is a good thing that he does.  
  
  
Only a complete fool would compare the abuse he had gotten from a desperate man on death row, for hiding his own innocent children in the basement with the rotting corpse of their mother, to the abuse he gets from the depraved man who had driven that convicted piece of shit to desperation to begin with.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Baekhyun is a little past sixteen when he thinks about how he spends his nights in the boss's bed than anywhere else.  
  
  
Just like him, Yifan comes from the East. He likes Yifan more than anyone for the stories the man tells him about his birth country and those left of his people; for the way Yifan's voice sounds before cutting a man down and letting the mutts feed on the remains; for the way Yifan fucks him until he can barely keep up, can barely feel his legs, and he's shamelessly covered in cum for the rest of the famiglia to see.  
  
  
In bed, he is everyone else's god. Yifan is his. Wu Yifan who treats him like the whore he really is and makes it clear for the underground empires to understand that, whatever Yifan wants, he gets. Wu Yifan holds all the power, _the real power_ , including that which Baekhyun thinks as his own.  
  
  
Baekhyun lives with a dragon and is the dragon's favourite chew toy until all that is left for him is to completely break.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Wu Yifan loves to dangle hope in people's faces, convincing them that all is not yet lost and that he is a man of reason; of kindness; of mercy. It is Wu Yifan's utter pleasure to provide in the guise of a good Samaritan, a friend, an angel—before he tears all of the illusions apart and those who owe him realize that it would have been better, had they simply sold their soul to the devil from the very start. Yifan only knows to give, to be generous, if there will be more, _so much more_ , for him to take.  
  
  
(Power and prestige. Daddy and mommy died for some sociopath's desire for more power and prestige. More, more, _more_.)  
  
  
Yifan, the unspoken king of the hell that Baekhyun knows, handsomely laughs, kisses him, and calls him so, _so beautiful_ and _his_ , just as the mortal demon turns purple to black and transforms sighs into anguished screams to reiterate possession. Yifan calls the intensity of the red on his chest love, but he knows what it really is—pain. Pain remains as it is, just something that exhausts his vocal chords until they feel like ripping, tearing; because the sex he knows, he only recently discovers, is what those outside of the famiglia calls rape.  
  
  
A hug from Yifan will lead to rape. A kiss from Yifan always leads to rape. He doesn't know what sex is if it doesn't hurt, if it doesn't break him, and yet, he heavily denies it as being the only act of intimacy he knows; that sex, to him, is just—has always been, and always is—rape, because he is Yifan's favourite and Yifan _loves_ it best when he's too broken to say no.  
  
  
The denial helps him cope with the pain. It faces the world for him; lets him hide in the recesses of fabricated safety until the curtains are drawn over the eyes of his unaccepting mind and he is numb, entirely numb and separate from the body that bears the tortuous burn of ropes, and steel, and pure friction. By the end of the fourth night, Baekhyun is battered and broken again and he is locked away in a heavily guarded room with barred windows; nothing more than a toy to be kept and torn apart again for the next time that he is remembered.  
  
  
He wakes. His back is bleeding. He cannot recall why—he thinks he passed out when the ﬂogging began—but nonetheless, he crawls slowly and in silent agony because nobody is there to help. Nobody can help him when nobody else is allowed inside that room aside from himself and Yifan.  
  
  
His hand already knows to reach for the drawer to his right. The alcohol burns. At least, it would have and he knows it should, but nothing is ever enough to hurt anymore.  
  
  
If there's anything he can use to start a ﬁre, then he could simply burn himself or he can let the gashes fester until the wounds breed an infection. Easier to do, in theory, is to be such an unsatisfying whore to the next maﬁoso that fucks him so he can earn himself a bullet in the head. To Yifan's dogs, however, a body is a body. It doesn't have to respond. It doesn't even have to be warm.  
  
  
He wonders then—not for the ﬁrst time—why he even bothered to ﬁght back in the past.  
  
  
(Why has he tried so hard to survive?)  
  
  
Once, after what feels like a hundred years ago, he managed to escape. He ran for his life, for whatever he believed it to have been worth, and he swore to himself that it was the ﬁrst and last time he would let himself spill all his fears to strangers in uniform.  
  
  
Nobody believed him when he had been twelve and he had cried about how much it confused and scared and hurt him to be passed around like a toy. Nobody believed he had spent most of his waking moments sitting on the laps of those powerful men in the motivational election posters or kneeling between their thighs, a mere boy told to suck or be starved and beaten. Nobody listened because he was young, he was ignorant, and he was a male— _a boy_ —who shouldn't be saying that he abhorred sex and what he had between his own legs.  
  
  
(What kind of _real man_ says that? They spat. How many mirrors had he broken afterwards, because he disgusted himself so much?)  
  
  
If he had just let the man—whose hanging would be broadcasted tomorrow—kill him, he wouldn't have to live another day as Wu Yifan's favorite little whore. He wouldn't be here drinking and making disinfectant burn from the inside instead of the skin on his back. He would already be dead and free and that would be it. That...  
  
  
That would be it, and it would ﬁnally be the end.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Baekhyun is half-way to seventeen when he admits that he favours some clients over the rest. He can probably go as far as saying that he has a favourite.  
  
  
Do Kyungsoo is Eastern, prefers to be called D.O., and is young.  
  
  
D.O. is a good decade older than he is but is much younger than Yifan and, most likely, a mile less inﬂuential. He wonders what use Yifan has for an 'engineer', but readily ﬂings the pondering for another time once a cock pushes into him. And _oh_ , how D.O. _fucks_ like his craft—tentative, organized, and precise, melding the primitive act of sex with the intricacies of art and reducing him into mere putty underneath a pair of heavy and calloused hands.  
  
  
But the sex is always just a trial, always just preparation before the new dolls come in to fuck him before he can even recover from D.O. It takes some getting used to to be comfortable with D.O.'s toys. Unlike human partners, the dolls don't stop, and he's always left utterly incoherent and helpless and _raw_ in the end. Baekhyun always feels like he's about to die amidst the uncannily human prototypes until the moment that D.O. deems their test-run performance adequate.  
  
  
They're state-of-the-art androids, his favourite client explains to him. Custom-made Personal Companions—PersoComs—for the maﬁa's sex trafﬁcking business. According to the man, it'll be much longer before the above-ground societies' modern technology catches up to the underground empires and produces similar models. D.O.'s voice is always void of emotion but, nonetheless, Baekhyun thinks explaining anything to an uneducated whore like him is a rather kind thing to do.  
  
  
"You did very well," D.O. praises him, rufﬂing his sweat-slicked hair and even rubbing his back.  
  
  
He can feel the copious amounts of manufactured cum dripping from between his legs and his own pink cock painful and crying from overstimulation. Somehow, he feels appreciated rather than used; feels both satiated and unhurt. For the ﬁrst time in his life, he vaguely expects a client to try and hold his hand so he could squeeze back than push them away.  
  
  
D.O. always tells him words of gratitude; always calls him a good boy; always says he's the only reason to be envious of Yifan. This time, his client promises him a gift—the most special gift for the most special boy, the man says—before leaving.  
  
  
D.O. will give him a gift.  
  
  
Because he's special. He's appreciated. He likes that. Very much.  
  
  
It almost makes Baekhyun forget that D.O., too, pays the price for the opportunity to cum in him.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
"You must be getting lonely, staying here without company, without anyone to talk to..." Yifan concludes, just as the man pulls out of him, slow and painful, and stains the inside of his thighs with cum and blood.

 

Baekhyun can't stop himself from shivering. He doesn't know whether to cry or to be relieved about what he's ﬁnally feeling because he doesn't have to be stretched and torn anymore. He hasn't recovered yet, and a small part of him fears Yifan will shove his face down the ruined sheets if he dares to fall asleep; if anything, no matter how much he says he wants to stop breathing, he still is so terriﬁed of actually dying.  
  
  
"You know you can tell me anything, don't you, Baekhyun?"  
  
  
Baekhyun hesitates to respond. He never knows when Yifan will snap without provocation. It could be a trap.  
  
  
Yifan could be testing him; could be gauging how much use there is left in him. Maybe Yifan has ﬁnally acknowledged that it's too much investment and too little return to keep a defective and sentimental whore like him, no matter how easy he is on the eyes or how lovely his voice is, but Yifan only presses lips against his own and in a manner that is so deceptively soft and careful, before the man cups his face. The next thing he knows, he's nestled in Yifan's lap, both nervous and comfortable enough to let a moan escape his mouth because Yifan is kissing his nape.  
  
  
"I have something for you," Yifan says next, once the unusually delicate treatment of what otherwise are rough large hands and vicious teeth have already reduced him to a ﬂushed and breathless mess.  
  
  
Then, a hand caresses his cheek, a ghostly and revering motion over the red that has dusted over it, and tips his chin up for him to look at the corner of their private room.  
  
  
"Do you like him?" Yifan asks, visibly expecting a verbal response from him this time, but Baekhyun doesn't know how—and what—to answer.  
  
  
Whatever—whoever—he's looking at... is wearing his new warm clothes, the ones that Yifan personally picked for him but were just too large and pointless for him to wear because he spends most of his time without them anyway. The man's eyes are bigger than his and are both sharp and rounded. The eyes are open, _beautiful_ , but they look so— _empty_. So much emptier than the pair he remembers seeing on his own reﬂection.  
  
  
This stranger is handsome, almost familiar because of the brown in his blank irises and the East in his features, but the way that the man is stunning makes him surreal, almost unacceptable to Baekhyun's young and simple mind.  
  
  
Baekhyun knows what a dead man looks like. He has seen too many of them, both whole and in pieces; both fresh and already decaying. The unmoving man in the corner of the room could be because there's no colour in the man's cheeks and hair, only snow, like that in old people.  
  
  
The stranger sits like Yifan, unblinking; like a bored, lazy king on a throne.  
  
  
"W-what is he?" He ﬁdgets and folds his own legs as he tries to escape the pair of blank eyes from the other side of the room.  
  
  
Is this... _thing_ an addition to the list of fetishes he should want with his clients...?  
  
  
There's a shaking in his voice and a tremor in his hands while he tries to hide himself in Yifan's broad chest, asking if it is indeed a dead man looking at them. Yifan only chuckles and kisses his cheek, amused by his attempts to comprehend what's happening and only accomplishing to scare himself. Out of nowhere, Baekhyun is told that D.O. isn't quite fond of the living and abhors the dead, just as he's guided to lie on his shaky hands and knees.  
  
  
While ﬁngers sink inside his warmth, Yifan tells him about D.O.'s role in the family, about D.O.'s work and deeds without ever dirtying his own hands, before Yifan reminds him why he's there.  
  
  
The ﬁngers drives sharply against his prostate. Scraping. Again and again. Things get overwhelming too soon, Baekhyun realizes Yifan _despises_ D.O. and he begins to cry.  
  
  
Yifan continues to speak, scissoring long and rough digits inside him while tracing the tattoo of the dragon on his hip with another playful hand. It's the famiglia's brand, the mark of Yifan's possessions, and the man reminds him of this by slapping his thigh; hard, until the skin is red and tender, as if to make a point. To whom? To D.O., perhaps. Or, maybe—because Yifan has always been _just_ a touch insane—to this un-living stranger in their room watching them make a mockery out of what otherwise should be an act of love.  
  
  
Baekhyun feels shame; for being a grown man's favourite toy; for being unable to control even his own body; for letting a stranger, whether truly alive or dead, watch him sink to his lowest point because he's clenching around Yifan's ﬁngers like it's the man's big fat cock. His thigh is bleeding now and he cums without being touched, but Yifan doesn't stop _. Of course, Yifan doesn't stop_.  
  
  
Yifan has trained him well. There is simply no choice when Yifan drags him by his hair in front of the unmoving ﬁgure of another man in their room. Yifan fucks him in front of the unmoving stranger, who only stares at him. Stares, and stares, and stares...  
  
  
Baekhyun feels terribly vulnerable and even more and more ashamed.  
  
  
(But at this point, he knows nothing good can come out of ever begging Yifan to stop.)  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
**_"I keep my promises."_**  
  
  
...utters the stranger in Baekhyun's room, the moment Yifan leaves.  
  
  
He... knows that warm voice.  
  
  
No one else talks to him like that.  
  
  
The stranger—the supposed dead man from the corner—is now a tall, imposing ﬁgure in the dark; a giant with an unnatural, electric blue glow in his artiﬁcial irises. He would think of this man like Yifan, but the man— _the hyper-realistic android_ —does not step on him, does not beat him, only picks him up from where Yifan simply left him on the blood-crusted ﬂoor.  
  
  
The android is strong. Not violent, not cruel. Its touch is cold but gentle, very gentle, as if he were the most fragile thing in the world.  
  
  
He supposes he is. He's the only vulnerable and breakable part of this hand-crafted giant's world, the only living thing to breathe and spread colour. It's stunning how human the fake man in front of him is and how it appears to drink in the sight of him, studying and memorizing his every detail—each line, crease, and gentle slope.  
  
  
He laughs. It's a weak laugh and it hurts his throat, but he has to address the weird feeling, somehow, that comes from being the sole focus of curious eyes.  
  
  
There is nothing to admire about him. Even he is ashamed of himself and the marks on his battered body, but the android doesn't know that. What the android _does_ know is to put him to bed; to reach for the disinfectant and pour it for him, as if it knows that he thinks of drinking it—again; sometimes; all the time—in hopes of killing the monsters inside him. The custom-made doll embraces him to give him something else other than the pain of shame to bear.

 

This is a hug, isn't it...?  
  
  
He doesn't remember the last time he has been cradled like this; doesn't know what he thinks he expects when his ﬁngertips graze against the android's soft, plush lips. He knows he expects more hurt, though, but the android only leans ever closer to him in response to his touch and refuses to let him go. He feels comforted, being embraced like this is comforting.  
  
  
(This is the best dream he has had in years.)  
  
  
Perhaps, only men can be cruel. Perhaps, cruelty only comes from being human. And, because this android isn't a man, it makes Baekhyun almost feel...  
  
  
Safe.  
  
  
**_"I hope you like Chanyeol."_**  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Baekhyun just turned seventeen and has just survived his second suicide attempt of the year.

  
There's a new face in his dreams. It is a hateful face, that of the man that Yifan manipulated the judiciary to hang, and he lets himself be killed by this man, every time. He ﬁnds that there is nothing more disappointing than waking up afterwards to a bright sun blocked by thick steel bars and distorted by stained glass.  
  
  
Yifan is gentler with him. The man always is with every failed attempt to take his own life, although not that much, just enough that the famiglia's private doctor wouldn't have to come and visit so soon. Gentle and kind are not words to be used with people who kidnap people to be sold and used when they aren't to be simply killed.  
  
  
There's a sudden light in the dark. There are two... three Yifans because his vision is hazy and it hurts to be awake, and Yifan _, the real Yifan_ , curls lips into a smile as the lighter births an ember on the tip of a premium cigar.  
  
  
Yifan—his lover, his owner, his _god_ —smells like smoke, like ﬁre, like life. Yifan is the only one who still calls him _Baekhyun_. Yifan is the only one who knows that _Baekhyun_ still exists.  
  
  
(He can't fucking die because of Yifan.)  
  
  
'Just let me die,' he thinks, as he hears his broken bones crack and feels the blood trickle out of him because Yifan dirties his own hands and carries him off the cold ﬂoor, all before brushing the tip of a nose against his neck and softly calling him by the name his parents gave him; as if that would make him forget; as if that would make everything better; as if that would make the nightmares stop and anticipate the next time Yifan almost kills him.  
  
  
Wu Yifan adores him, and Baekhyun—Baekhyun doesn't want to be worshipped anymore.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Baekhyun is almost seventeen when Yifan pats his head and praises him.  
  
  
'For always attracting quality goods,' the aged man says.  
  
  
Yifan calls people of his— _their_... _race_... exotic, and so do their clients from the various countries on the other side of the globe who sit on thrones that the poor working class has built for them. Because of how long his exposure has been to despicable things like it, it almost doesn't occur to him how sick it is to hear someone call him a pet; as if he weren't like anybody else who was capable of emotions; of being hurt; of yearning to sleep without expecting that someone might come in the middle of the night and drag him to another bed.  
  
  
It doesn't occur to him that he's just as sick; for being the bait; for being the bribe; for continuing to exist despite of all his sins.  
  
  
But, what does he know?  
  
  
What does he have?  
  
  
_Nothing_.

 

There's nothing else, there's _nothing_ out there, for someone like him. He had spent the previous years writhing underneath so, _so_ many men and believing that this— _this_ —is how the world has always been. He's just a dog to be fed and a toy to be bent and he—  
  
  
"You're not going to scream?" Yifan asks, with a lilt in his husky voice and a glint in his eye. "You're a very good boy for me today."  
  
  
Baekhyun's breath catches. It's difﬁcult and painful to breathe when his eyes are burning hot with a seemingly never-ending stream of fresh tears. There's a ringing in his ears and a blaring that comes from the beating organ in his chest. He's so scared, he's so fucking terriﬁed of the man hovering over him, one hand groping the pink of his nipple and making new marks on his neck.  
  
  
Below him, the barrel of a riﬂe makes a squelch. He's too scared to even blink, fearing every second of hearing the sound that comes from cold metal gliding inside of him. He's going to die. He's going to die he's _going to die he's going to die_.  
  
  
He knows for sure that Yifan is going to _kill_ him this time.  
  
  
"You're _such_ a good boy for me, Baekhyun," Yifan exhales, breath warm against his throat, and shoves the riﬂe deeper inside him.  
  
  
The pain tears through his spine and his mouth reﬂexively opens into a silent scream. His voice is gone and his throat is parched. Everything that isn't numb just— _hurts_ and _bleeds_.  
  
  
"You're _my_ good boy," Yifan growls, sharply biting down on the juncture between his neck and shoulder enough to draw blood. It takes _every_ ﬁber of his battered body to stop himself from writhing, terriﬁed of setting off the trigger. "You're not supposed to let _anyone else_ call you theirs. Have you forgotten whom you belong to? Huh, _whore_?"  
  
  
_But I haven't been with anyone else,_ Baekhyun can't say and continues to cry, begging by sucking on the ﬁngers being thrusted into his mouth. Even the whimpers are shot dead before they can be born.  
  
  
He doesn't understand what triggered Yifan's anger, _Yifan's intense jealousy_. He only understands that his lover— _fucker_ —both want to see him fall off the edge and be rid him. Being at the utter mercy of a loaded gun is somehow his own doing; a punishment for a sin he doesn't remember doing and exists only in a mind ﬁlled with unburied ghosts. The metal of the riﬂe's barrel is tearing more than his already torn skin; ripping _him_ apart, body and mind. It's too much pain and too little pleasure.  
  
  
He doesn't want to die this way. Not like this, terriﬁed out of his wits and treated no better than an animal.  
  
  
Spots are forming in the edges of his vision, dimming the world and eating away at the sight of Yifan's delighted face. His eyes remain open but everything is so dull and painful. Time ticks along much slower when he's starting to lose consciousness, without any choice but to surrender the last strings of sovereignty over his own body because his mind doesn't want to wait until each limb, _each bone_ has been viciously wrenched off of him. No one is ever entirely brave to bear the process of becoming a deranged man's newest trophy.  
  
  
"...ust... kill me..." Baekhyun pleads using one of his last, tortured breaths.  
  
  
He can't feel anything.  
  
  
Not the ﬁngers violating his mouth, not the gun making violent friction inside him, and deﬁnitely not the heart in his chest that is telling him that it still wants to live. It desperately beats to keep him alive, no matter how laboured and slow, because it wants them both to survive. They have survived so many terrible things together and it refuses to give up now.  
  
  
But he's tired and he wants his heart to stop trying.  
  
  
He just wants this to stop.  
  
  
"Seventeen years ago, your father stole my favourite whore," Yifan—a man thirty years older than him; his replacement for daddy; fully man in being possessing the devil himself's nature—says. "How old are you now, Baekhyun? Seventeen?"  
  
  
The riﬂe is pulled out.  
  
  
Checked for bullets.  
  
  
It _clicks_.  
  
  
The girth of the cold metal meets his skin again, stretching him, and slowly inches its way back his scraped insides. Not that he feels it as harshly as he did the ﬁrst time. If God is as merciful as they say, then, he thinks, maybe He can bless him with a single bullet.  
  
  
He wants to die.  
  
  
(But what if he _does_ die?)  
  
  
Yifan smiles—and he _craves_ it but he also realizes that, no. _No_ , he doesn't want to die, he just wants _this_ to end—and he tenses. He doesn't want to die he _doesn't want to die oh god **he doesn't want to die**.  
  
  
_ He can hear and _feel_ his own blood rushing, his own heart _beating_ — _  
  
  
_ Baekhyun, for the second time in his life, hears the same resounding _bang_ that snatched the man he called daddy from him. _  
  
  
_ He watches as the brilliance of red from burst guts and a shattered skull spills over the sheets like a cleansing; sticks to his face and drips down his cheek to give his swollen and parted lips a taste of another man's life. It's a twang of copper on his tongue, disgusting and strong, while the smell of gunpowder ﬁlls the air as Yifan's mutilated body slumps to the edge of the ruined bed, dangles, and falls slowly to the hard wood ﬂoor, spewing more blood and gore over the furnished planks. _  
  
  
_ The room is silent, save for the sound of something dropping—the rest of a smoking handgun's magazine making a loud _thud_. _  
  
_

_  
_ "You are safe now," a deep voice tells him _, reassures him_ , accompanied by the faintest whirring in place of where a string of heartbeats is supposed to be heard, like a calming lullaby, when he ﬁnds himself cradled close to a warm and broad chest. "I will keep you safe now."

 

He cries. _  
  
  
_ For the ﬁrst time in seventeen years, Baekhyun experiences solace instead of fear in the arms of a man much bigger than he is, discovers God from a glimpse of eerily loving blue eyes, and drifts off to sleep listening to Chanyeol's soothing promises.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by EXO's Artificial Love and the story of Galatea and Pygmalion.
> 
> Pygmalion was a sculptor who carved an ivory statue of a woman. He named this statue Galatea, who was untainted by the sins of earthly women and was simply the most beautiful and ideal woman, and he fell in love with her. Galatea, in this sense, is artificial; man-made. Hence, Galatea, in the fic, is Chanyeol, whom D.O. generously created for his favorite whore.
> 
> Chanyeol is a protector, a lover, and everything that is _supposed_ to be perfect for young Baekhyun.
> 
> (Whether Chanyeol truly is, is a question for another time.)


End file.
